


A Job To Do

by blogotron9000



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Friendship, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-09 14:10:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5542838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blogotron9000/pseuds/blogotron9000
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Resistance, no one's job is ever defined as narrowly as its title might suggest. Fighter pilots fly starfighters -- but they also run reconnaissance missions, repair their own ships, take turns in the galley on mess duty … and cruise the Galaxy looking for surviving Senators. </p><p>Poe Dameron, Snap Wexley, and Jess Pava find themselves on what amounts to a salvage mission. It's just that this time the wreckage they're digging through happens to be the shards of the New Republic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Here was the thing about blowing up a First Order superweapon: you still had to get up and go to work the next day.

The First Order was reeling, yes, but the Republic was in pieces. And somehow it had come to be Poe Dameron’s job to help put those pieces back together.

Of course, no one’s job in the Resistance was ever defined as narrowly as its title suggested. Sure, fighter pilots flew starfighters -- but they also ran reconnaissance missions, went undercover behind enemy lines, repaired their own ships when the mechanics had too much on their hands, took turns in the galley on mess duty … and cruised the Galaxy looking for missing senators. It was basically a salvage mission, except that this time the wreckage they were digging through happened to be the shards of the New Republic.

They might as well have been looking for a proton in a particle storm. A week out and Poe, Snap, and Jessika had nothing to show for their efforts. The surviving senators had gone deep underground, and who could blame them after seeing what had happened to the Hosnian System? The Galaxy didn’t know that Starkiller Base was now a planet-sized meteor shower -- everyone, senator or not, had to be spending a lot of time watching the skies for a peculiar red glow. Life was full of enough uncertainty before the possibility cropped up that you, everyone you knew, and your entire culture might be wiped off the face of the Galaxy without so much as a head’s-up.

So Poe, Snap, and Jess had spent five nights on face-meltingly hot Joralla chasing Senator Dextee Madin, and had nothing to show for it. Nothing but a bar tab that would raise at least a few eyebrows with the Resistance Admiralty. If the brass wanted to send a bunch of cockpit jockeys out on a long haul, they had to expect at least a few bottles of Alderbathean rum to get charged to their accounts. Fighter pilots flew hard, and they died all too easy; small wonder if they drank hard too.

“You know why we’re not having any luck?” Jess opined, from the dark corner of tonight’s chosen dive bar. Poe had to lean in close to hear her over the noise from the klig-klig band currently holding court on the far side of the bar. And when he was close enough to hear her, he was close enough to smell her -- her and Snap both. She’d stripped down to a sweat-stained tank over her uniform trousers tonight, but that didn't help. He was sure he wasn't faring any better: by that point in their stay on Joralla, none of them had any clothing left that could be described as anything other than sweat-stained. “Because Snap brought that bag of bolts. No one’s going to approach us with him riding shotgun.”

Snap’s heavily-modified battle droid, Mister Bones, cranked its head in Jess’s direction. The animal and bird bones draped from its carved beak of a face-plate clattered a warning. “WHO ARE YOU CALLING A BAG OF BOLTS, YOU GERM-RIDDLED FLESH-BAG?”

“Bones,” said Snap, and BB-8, from under the table, burbled reproachfully at Mister Bones. It occurred to Poe that Jess probably wasn’t entirely wrong that Bones made their party less than approachable by any stray Senators in the vicinity.

“NO, I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE,” Mister Bones informed BB-8. Snap kept promising that he was going to figure out how to modulate the droid’s vocoder volume, when he got around to it. Since the droid had been built a few years before the New Republic and had now outlived that organization, Snap’s concept of ‘one of these days’ probably didn’t match up with Poe’s. “SHE IS CLEARLY CONSTRUCTED OF FLESH, THAT FACT IS UNDENIABLE.”

Poe put his boot in between Bones and BB-8 just in time to stop BB-8’s rolling charge of miniature outrage. “Snap, call off your crazy kill-bot before we all go deaf. I’m overqualified to referee between a jumped-up battlebot and a lieutenant who should know better.” Jess only made a face in response.

“Sorry, boss,” said Snap, and wiped beads of sweat out of his beard with one hand. With his elbow, he nudged his coin purse closer to his droid. “Bones, can you please calm yourself down and go get us another round?”

“OF COURSE, MASTER TEMMIN.” The droid got up from the table, bones a-rattle again, and Jess rolled her eyes.

“Snap, I think you enjoy that thing a little too much,” she told Snap, and Snap grinned into his all-but-empty glass. “Commander, how much longer do we have to hang out on this sweaty armpit of a planet? I don’t know what’s going to kill me first: the heat, or that damn droid.” She peered down into her glass, then drained the last few drops of yellow-green liquid from the bottom. “Or the rum.”

Jess wasn’t wrong. Their latest lead at tracking down Madin had petered out here in the city of Crio. Madin had been mid-transit to the Hosnian System on her way back from a visit to her home district of Adoris when the First Order had struck. The last known bearing for her transport vessel had to have brought her this way -- and there were plenty of hiding spots for a moneyed politician on gem-rich Joralla.

Well, for _certain_ moneyed politicians. Just the lucky ones, or one. Poe had checked on the fate of the sitting Senator from Joralla before his squadron had headed this way. Last seen on Hosnian Prime, presumed dead in the Starkiller attack. Where had Poe been by then, when the Republic burned? Sleeping off a TIE-fighter-shaped bender in the Jakku desert? Hiding out in Niima Outpost while shooting off SOS after SOS into the galaxy?

“We’ll head out tomorrow,” he heard himself saying, and Jessika’s grimace melted into a grin. “If Madin’s still alive, she’s so far underground we’ll never dig her up. There are others out there. This plan doesn’t rise and fall on her back.” No, it rose and fell on theirs -- his and Snap’s and Jess’s.

Behind him, glass shattered.

Poe came up out of the chair. He whipped his blaster around and kicked the chair out, out and into whatever threat had crept up. His heart hammered in his ears, and when he blinked, he saw flames.

Around him, silence. He blinked, forcing his vision to clear. Mister Bones stood in front of him, a half-spilled tray of glasses in front of him and Poe’s upended chair at his feet. “MASTER TEMMIN,” the droid said. “HE HAS THREATENED ME. MAY I HAVE PERMISSION TO REND HIM LIMB FROM LIMB?”

“You absolutely may not,” said Snap. “Go wait outside. _Now_ , Bones.”

The droid deposited the tray onto the table, making the fresh bottle of rum in the middle tip over. Jess saved the bottle, glancing at Snap; Poe righted his chair, kicked the glass shards away from his feet, and settled back in. His heart was still slamming against his ribs, but he seemed to have remembered how to breathe. Around them, the bar slowly resumed its normal level of background chatter.

“Boss,” said Snap. “Everything okay?”

“Just tired,” said Poe. He scrubbed his hands through his hair. Underneath the table, BB-8 chirped and bumped his calf. “We all are. That’s why we need to get off this rock.”

“We’re all tired,” said Jess, “but only one of us just pulled a gun on Temmin’s walking garbage heap.”

“I’m also tired of the general atmosphere of insubordination going on around here,” said Poe. The words didn’t come out as lightly as he’d intended. Jess looked at the tabletop, her shoulders suddenly erect and square. Poe bit the inside of his cheek, and pushed himself back from the table. “Come on. Let’s get out of this kriffing place. I’ll file for liftoff clearance tonight, and we should be able to hit the sky first thing in the morning.”

“Sounds like a plan,” said Snap, with forced jocularity, and he and Jess fell in together as they followed Poe out of the bar.


	2. Chapter 2

Oh-four-hundred hours, and Poe snapped awake.

Pilots never got used to too much sleep – you never knew when the base was going to be lit up by flashing lights and sirens to warn about an incoming raid. When the choice was between “go from sound asleep to sitting in a cockpit within five minutes” or “get blown into space dust”, you learned to adapt. Poe had never had trouble rolling out of his bunk and into a flightsuit, but this was different.

A bitter tang lay heavy on his tongue: adrenaline. It was a taste he was well familiar with: you didn’t fly spirals around TIE fighters or do barrel rolls across the business end of a Star Destroyer without a little adrenaline kick in the pants. It wasn’t something you were supposed to wake up carrying in your mouth, though. Dreams should taste like milk and honey, not like death and destruction. Not like ash, and the oily odor of burned flesh on the air. Not like blood trickling down the back of your throat, like cold fingers parting your memories like a fine-toothed comb through dark thick oil--

He lurched out of bed, and peeled his shirt off his back. It thudded wetly to the floor by his feet … or not quite to the floor. BB-8 chirped and shuddered, sending the sweat-soaked shirt flying. “Sorry, pal,” Poe said. He squatted low and laid a hand on BB-8’s dome. A humid breeze blew in threw the open window. It stirred the jumbled sheets on Poe’s bed, but didn’t do much to cool the room off. He wondered how Snap and Jess could sleep. Poe had grown up on Yavin IV, on the outskirts of that planet’s often unforgiving jungle, and even to him the heat was interminable. At least the hotel’s setup -- a cylindrical center unit with three bedrooms studding the outside -- afforded them some privacy to toss and turn in peace. “Didn’t see you there.” He flicked one of the bristling antennae atop the droid. “Though you might have a second career as a coat rack in you if you’re interested.”

BB-8 shimmied once under Poe’s palm, then unleashed a long string of concerned burbling punctuated only by the occasional rude noise.

“Buddy!” Poe cut in, when the droid paused. “Hey, calm down.” He settled onto the floor next to BB-8, in the pile of sheets he’d kicked aside in his sleep. His arm fit comfortably around BB-8’s round shape. “BB-8, we’ve got a job to do. Every planet in the Republic is counting on us -- even though they don’t know it yet. And we’re not going to let them down.”

BB-8 blew a raspberry.

“Okay, yes, Mister Bones by his mere and very unnerving existence might let some folks down. But if we can’t pick up the pieces of the Republic, who’s going to?”

A soft whistle from the droid.

Poe sighed, and ducked his head. “No one has to pick up the pieces of me, thank you very much. It takes more than a couple bad nights to stop Poe Dameron, Hero of the Resistance. I’ve got a medal, you know.” BB-8 whistled, and opened up a compartment on his lower dome. “Yeah, yeah, and so do you. I didn’t forget, you don’t have to show me. And just so you know, I’m not--”

His attention snagged: not on BB-8, but on the sill of the open window. A thin roll of paper, wedged in the crack between the sill and the wall that held it. He crossed the room in two strides and pulled it free.

A glance out the window revealed no clues as to the note’s origins. The night was empty as far as Poe could see, nothing but dull darkness punctuated by the odd striplight indicating the entrance to the mine yards. As for the note itself, the handwriting was cramped, but legible. The missive was brief: _She’ll meet you. 65.01x15.89 -- 0500_.

When Poe was nine years old, not long after his mother had died, he’d asked his father about the war against the Empire. _What scares you?_ he’d wanted to know. Nine years old and already more comfortable in the cockpit of a starfighter than some pilots would ever be. He already knew then that war wasn’t pretty, but that sometimes it was important.

_What scares you, Dad?_

_That it was all for nothing._

Poe stood. The coordinates weren’t far, but neither was the assigned meeting time. Their assigned departure clearance from ground control was for 0930; that left Poe enough time to follow up on this message. Only just, though. He fished a clean-ish shirt out of his kit and shrugged it over his head. “BB-8,” he said, and the droid burbled a question. “No, you’re going to stay here. Tell Snap and Jess where I went, and that I’ll be back soon. And if I’m not back soon--”

BB-8 shrieked and shot straight into Poe’s knees.

“Ow! Hey, hey, calm down.” Poe dodged the droid’s frantic lunges, with mixed success. “I don’t care if you wake Snap and Jess up, but if I have to deal with Bones at this hour I’m going to shoot first and ask questions later.” BB-8 settled, and Poe dropped to one knee next to him. “It’ll be fine. I’ve got backup here that knows where I’m going, and it’s not like it’s great terrain for BB units where I’m headed. No offense, pal, but I can’t exactly carry you under one arm while I climb down a mineshaft.”

A soft, low croon from BB-8. Poe sighed. “Of course I’ll come back. I came back from a Star Destroyer, you don’t think I can handle one elderly Senator?”

The droid rocked back and forth once. Then he chirped a question, opened a compartment, and extended a pincer attachment in Poe’s direction. Poe seized it and shook it firmly. “Yes, it’s a promise, buddy.”

With that, BB-8 let him shuffle into his boots and jacket without further objection. Poe shut the hotel door behind him with scarcely a sound. He slunk off into the sweaty shadows of the Jorallan night with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and hoped that keeping promises was still part of his skill set as a Resistance fighter.

So many people had fought so hard. So many had died -- soldiers and pilots and civilians alike. It wouldn’t be for nothing. He would keep his parents’ promises too: a new New Republic. A Galaxy united by more than fear of the Empire and its ugly remnants. He owed them that much.


	3. Chapter 3

Poe didn’t need clearance from ground control to take the shuttle out of the city. Snap had flown the shuttle to Joralla, and the pilot’s seat was still set too far from the console for Poe’s comfort. He adjusted it forward a few inches, narrowed the space between the armrests, and settled in. The cockpit of his X-wing would have felt more welcoming, always had, but X-wings were flashy. And while Poe sometimes enjoyed “flashy”, it wasn’t a great choice at this point.

The shuttle, intended for passengers and cargo, was ten times heavier than an X-wing and far less maneuverable. Poe had flown a lot of things, and shuttles had been one of the first he’d been trusted with solo. Not the first thing he’d ever flown in, though --that had been his mother’s very own A-wing. Long before he’d been old enough to fly alone, he’d been allowed to settle into her lap for the occasional spaceflight; “just to get it out of my system,” she’d always said. He could remember his much smaller hands resting on the controls just under hers …

The memory slid sideways, turned upside down and discarded by a third pair of hands, huge and long-fingered and encased in black leather. Poe shuddered and shoved back against the sudden queasiness, forced it aside to deal with another time. He didn’t have time for a flight down memory lane right now anyway.

The coordinates weren’t far outside the city. It took less than two minutes of air time to get him as close as he could land the shuttle. Beyond the last flat ground, Joralla fell away in a crazy maze of jagged yellow stone carved into a criss-crossing honeycomb. He left the shuttle in the shelter of an outcropping, and fell into an easy jog to make double-time toward the rendezvous point. There was a 0930 departure slot to make it back for, after all, and--

His boot slipped on the surface of the rock face. Both feet went out from under him, and he bounced on one side. The powdery rock did little to slow his descent, and he found himself skidding on his back down into a waiting mine shaft. One hand snagged in the metal mesh of the ladder, and Poe managed to control his fall the last ten feet. He landed on one foot and one knee in a puff of yellow dust.

“Ah,” said a woman’s deep voice. The sound echoed in the tunnel, and for a moment Poe wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. One hand went instinctively to his blaster; he forced it back down to his side. A pale blue light flickered, and illuminated the well-lined face of Senator Dextee Madin. Her dark eyebrows were drawn in a disdainful frown: more or less the same expression she’d worn in most of the news footage Poe had seen of her. Nice to be treated with the same courtesy as any Senator or holo interviewer would have received, at least. “One of the great heroes of the Resistance, I presume.”

“Always nice to meet a fan.” Poe got to his feet and gave himself a brief dusting-off. “Senator, I’m Poe Dameron, and I’m a pilot who can get you off this rock. I’ve got a shuttle parked not far from here, and a morning takeoff berth. In a couple hours, you can be space-side, and forget this sweaty armpit of a planet for good.”

“Get me off this planet -- and take me where?” Madin’s arms were folded across her chest, with bluish shadows shifting across her sharp features every time she tapped the light against her shoulder. Occasionally, the light fell on the pair of dark-uniformed guards standing just a few paces behind her. Good to know the Senator wasn’t on her own, at least. “What grand plan has the Resistance concocted?”

“We have a new safehouse established on Chandrila.” The Senator made a sharp noise in the back of her throat, but Poe pressed on. “That’s where the first Senate was held after the New Republic rose, after all. Good place to make a second go of it, I hope! All’s we need is some Senators to put in it!”

“What quaint iconography.” Madin’s chin lifted. “And how many Senators have you acquired for your new collection thus far?”

Poe shifted his weight. “If a senior Senator like you signs on, others will come. The other survivors -- and systems will send new representatives, once they see you step forward.”

“Once I step forward, I will likely as not be cut down. A single-stranded cord will not be a difficult chain for the First Order to break.” The Senator lifted her hand to interrupt Poe before he could object -- it was the hand with the light in it, casting the beam on Poe’s face and closing hers in darkness. “Lieutenant Dameron – Captain?”

“I generally prefer Commander, but you do you.”

“Commander Dameron. Everyone I worked with is dead now, and I have no desire either to join them in their eternal rest, nor to ignore their needless sacrifice by throwing myself on the same pyre. Surely you understand.”

Death was a familiar presence for any fighter pilot; shielding was the price you paid for a craft with maneuverability and speed, which meant any flight could be your last. All the more reason for Poe to move past the events on Jakku and his little Star Destroyer vacation -- they’d lost two dozen pilots taking down Starkiller Base. At least he was alive.

And at least he understood what their deaths had been for. “Yeah, I’ve lost some friends,” he said. “But they didn’t pay that price so I could go retire to some sweat-soaked planet in the Mid Rim. Living free of the First Order, it’s worth the price. We have to _make_ it worth that cost.”

“Hmm.” He couldn’t see Madin’s face, but he could feel her studying him. He could feel the light crawling over the new lines in his face, over the hollows under his eyes. An uncomfortable feeling, but he’d known worse. He squinted into the steady beam of the flashlight, waiting for a response. “And what price have you paid, Commander? And what more will you yet owe?”

Poe broke his gaze with Madin -- with the bright beam of her flashlight -- and his eyes found his powder-stained boots instead.

“Yes,” said Madin. “I thought so. Take my advice, Commander Dameron: retire to some sweat-soaked planet in the Mid Rim, or better yet, the Outer. Get as far as you can before they come for you, too. The Resistance loves its heroes the same way the Republic loved its politicians.” The light flickered out, and Poe heard the scrape of feet on stone. “You’ll be the first against the wall when the First Order comes.”

“You don’t believe that,” Poe called after her, but his uncertainty echoed back to him from the silent walls of the old tunnel.


	4. Chapter 4

Flying angry wasn’t generally a good plan, but Poe would be damned if he’d sit and take a few deep breaths before undertaking a two-minute low-air flight. He’d flown into Starkiller Base, hadn’t he? He could fly on a bellyful of frustration.

Directionless anger, too. What was there to be angry at? He couldn’t be mad at Senator Madin. He certainly couldn’t promise that the Resistance would keep her and her surviving colleagues safe from the First Order, not without lying. If he’d been able to guarantee that, he wouldn’t be flying around playing pick-up-the-pieces now.

Come to think of think of it, maybe his anger wasn’t so directionless after all. There seemed to be plenty of it pointed inward.

Snap and Jess were waiting in the shared central space of the hotel room, where rays of pink sunlight were just creeping in past the mist-smeared window. Snap was on one knee in front of BB-8, but he scrambled up to his feet when Poe banged through the door. “Boss,” he said. It was always _boss_ with Snap, never _commander_ or _sir_. It was a level of familiarity that wouldn’t have flown in the Republic Navy, but in the Resistance, it somehow always felt right to Poe. Especially since it was coming from a man more than ten years his senior, a man who’d fought for the Rebel Alliance itself before he’d fought for the Resistance or even the New Republic. _Sir_ got awkward then.

Poe waved a hand dismissively and tried not to think about what a mess he must look with dust-stained clothes and dark-circled eyes. “I know, I’m running late. Grab your kits, those birds aren’t going to fly themselves …” He trailed off, looking at Jess and Snap’s pale faces. “What? What did Bones do now?”

“It’s not Bones!” said Snap.

“For once,” said Jess.

“I HAVE DONE NOTHING ILLICIT,” said Mister Bones, from the door to Snap’s room, and added in a slightly more modulated voice, “THAT ANY OF YOU ARE AWARE OF.”

“Bones,” said Snap warningly.

Poe held his arms out at his sides. “Okay. Anyone want to explain to me what’s going on, or I am just interrupting your auditions for a bad holo comedy?”

Jess nudged BB-8 forward with her foot. “BB-8 picked up a signal -- coming in on a First Order frequency.”

Poe’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Standing in the middle of a ratty living room with the sunscreens off the windows, he felt exposed; he folded his arms across his chest and focused in on Snap’s words. “An older one,” Snap was saying. “Probably not an active unit of any sort. Just someone trying to get in touch with the Empire’s scraps.”

“Sympathizers, not spies,” Poe said, despite his dry mouth. Snap nodded. “All right. And they’re reporting our presence on Joralla to whatever higher-ups they think might be listening?”

“Not ours,” said Jess. BB-8 rocked back and forth, whistling unhappily. Poe knew what Jess was going to say before she could say it, knew he’d led the First Order right to their prize. “They’ve located Senator Madin here on Joralla, in the Thousand Mile Mines. She’s been sighted, and it sounds like some of them are moving to intercept her.”

#

It was happening again.

Snap and Jess were arguing. Mister Bones was hovering somewhere around the periphery of the fight, throwing the occasional insult into the mix and humming excitedly. He did that sometimes, if he thought combat was close on the horizon. Poe was--

Poe was on the floor.

He had his back to the wall, his head in his hands. BB-8 was between his feet, which was typically where BB-8 liked to be these days. The droid cooed when Poe’s eyes fell on him. “It’s happening again,” he told BB-8, and BB-8 shivered his disagreement. “Just like Jakku.”

Good people were going to die because he couldn’t hold a mission together. The truth was ugly, but it held fast no matter which direction Poe turned it. It was only because of the stormtrooper, Finn, that the mission to Jakku had been salvaged; and now Finn had paid the price for its success -- had come uncomfortably near paying the ultimate price, in fact. And Lor San Tekka and all of his neighbors, consigned to ashes for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And now Dextee Madin, too? Black leather gloves rifled through the index file in Poe’s brain, and handed him the scarlet-painted portraits of all the people that he’d failed, everyone who’d paid dearly for his mistakes. What had he been trying to prove, all this time? And who was he trying to prove it to? He knew who he was. So did Snap, Jess, General Organa. Finn. BB-8. The rest of his squadron. The Admiralty. Anyone that mattered. He was the guy who got the job done.

“Well, we can’t just leave him here!” That was Snap. That was Snap, bellowing loud enough to put Mister Bones to shame.

Jess pushed back. “I’ll get him to the hangar. You take the shuttle and Bones and see if you can grab the Senator, I’ll get him off-planet and we can rendezvous at Chandrila.”

“You’re going to cram him in a cockpit right now?” Snap flung back at her.

Jess flung her arms up in the air in exasperation, and Mister Bones said in a testing tone of voice, “THREAT DETECTED?”

Poe said mildly, “It’s a little embarrassing when you guys talk about me like I’m not even here.”

Silence hit the floor with all the weight of a dead bantha. Snap’s boots shuffled, the rotors in Mister Bones’ neck whirred as he looked back and forth between Poe and his master. It was Jess who finally broke into the stillness with her hands on her hips. “Commander, this isn’t working.”

“We talking mutiny here? Starfighters don’t have an airlock for you to shove me out of, but if you’re buckled in to the shuttle you might have a shot.” He pushed to his feet, and his legs held. That was good. “So I guess we’ve got a Senator to save.”

“Boss,” said Snap. “You need help. Happens to the best of us.”

“Well, obviously,” said Poe. His hand fell to the blaster on his side. He thought about the crackling blue blaster bolt screaming through the air and screeching to a halt under Kylo Ren’s direction. No, anyone they would encounter here on Joralla would react to blaster fire in a more conventional way. “But right now, Madin needs help too. We’re here because we have a job to do.”

He held Snap’s gaze, and finally, Snap nodded. “I don’t like this,” said Jess.

“Not a democracy, Pava. We don’t have time for you to babysit me.” He jabbed a finger at her shoulder. “You and Snap -- yes, and the crazy bag of bolts -- will be the ground team. I’ll give you some cover from the air. I can handle myself just fine crammed into a cockpit.”

Jess didn’t move back. “The general is going to hear about this,” she said. There was no malice in her voice. Just concern. Fear? She’d lost friends in the skies over Starkiller Base, too.

“Good,” said Poe, and offered her his hand. She shook it, not gently. “If I’m grounded, I’m grounded.” Behind him, BB-8 crooned to himself. “But first, let’s do what we came here to do.”

“Tell me you’re up for this,” said Snap. “Just look me in the eye, and tell me you’re up for this.”

“LOOK HIM IN THE EYE,” instructed Mister Bones, and BB-8 delivered the bigger droid a zap to the shin.

Poe let the droids’ bickering fall to the background, and met Snap’s gaze head-on. “I got this,” he said softly.

Snap clapped him on the shoulder. “All right, then. The rest we can figure out later. But for now, I think I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve that’ll help us against these First Order wanna-bes.”

Jess had her arms crossed across her chest, but she was clearly listening. Mister Bones’ head swiveled around, BB-8’s admonishments already forgotten. “MAY I BE OF ASSISTANCE, MASTER TEMMIN?” he asked, and Snap grinned.

“Oh, Bones. I certainly hope so.”


	5. Chapter 5

Snap was already rifling off ideas as they trotted double-time through the town to the spaceport where they could retrieve their ships. Snap was a good pilot. Not the best -- that was Poe -- and not the worst -- the position of worst pilot in a squadron tended to be a short-lived position, after all. But Snap’s skill in the cockpit made it easy to forget that though he was a good pilot, a pilot was far from all he was.

Poe knew Snap’s background; everyone did, because Snap couldn’t shut up about it when he’d had a drink or two. He’d joined the Rebellion when he was just a teenager, when Poe was still practically in diapers -- a fact that Snap referenced now and again when Poe used his rank to overrule him on a command decision. He’d fought against the Empire when it was still the Empire, or whatever fragments of it remained after Poe’s mother and father had helped to bring down the second Death Star at the Battle of Endor. Snap’s role then had been as a member of a tactical strike unit, a sort of rogue squadron of odds and ends who did the odd jobs that needed doing behind Imperial lines. Snap had the right skills for it, or he’d acquired them somewhere along the way: he could fly nearly anything, could turn any pile of wires and circuits into a communications array, could speak four languages and curse fluently in nine more. He was the guy you wanted for any reconnaissance mission, and every now and then, you might get a reminder that he was also the one you wanted in your corner for the wild sorts of smash-and-grab missions that cropped up in the life of Resistance fighters.

Shove Poe in a cockpit and throw him in front of a squadron of starfighters, and calling out formations and attack patterns was second nature. On the ground, though, things never seemed quite so clear-cut, and he was happy to defer to Snap’s expertise. “It’s all about contingencies,” said Snap, as they pushed through the foggy pink morning to the landing pads. “We can’t assume she’s been taken yet, or that she hasn’t been. Assuming is a good way to biff your objective.”

“Less showing off, more planning,” Jess grunted. Her R9 astromech droid rolled out to greet them with a whistle as they approached the assigned slots for their spacecraft. “Good to see you too, R9.” The droid piped a question, and Jess turned to Snap. “Well, I don’t know. Should I saddle up, Snap?”

Snap sucked on his front teeth for a moment, while Jess shifted her weight from side to side impatiently. Poe had just opened his mouth to nudge Snap forward when the other man lurched back into motion with a snap of his fingers. “No! Load your fighter into the carrier bay under the shuttle, you’re going to be on the ground with me. But don’t close up the bay -- I'm going to need a few minutes alone with your thrusters first.”

#

Sitting behind the controls of an X-wing again was a comfortable feeling. There was nothing Poe couldn’t do with an X-wing: given a good viewing scope, he could thread a needle with the fuselage; enough space to maneuver and there wasn’t a spacecraft he couldn’t intercept, no matter how much faster it was. TIE fighters offered thrilling speed and agility, you couldn’t beat a Y-wing for sheer firepower. But an X-wing? An X-wing was home. It was good to be home.

Poe hung low while Snap and Jess landed the shuttle just east of the mines Poe had visited earlier. He had a visual on them, but not for long: they kept the comm channel open as they ran to the gaping openings in the rock face and disappeared inside. The sounds of their muffled breathing filled Poe’s ears as they scratched their way down into the powdery rock in the first day’s light. Mister Bones was with them too; Poe could just make out the droid singing softly to himself -- an eerie habit the droid had had as long as Poe had known Snap. Like the overloud vocoder, it was something Snap had never gotten around to fixing; build a droid from scratch and keep it running for thirty-odd years, and Poe supposed you might get attached to its weird habits. “Report,” he said, when there was a pause in the soft background noise from the channel.

A crackle, then Jess’s voice. “Bones is picking up vibrations from deeper in the cave. Frequency too deep to be voices. Explosions, maybe?”

“Concussion grenades.” That was Snap’s voice. “Stupid move, in these close quarters. And in shafts that haven’t been used in years -- who knows how stable these things are?”

The guards who had come with Senator Madin would have been trained in the Crurian Institute on Chandrila, on top of their years of experience in her retinue. Surely they knew enough not to use such bombastic tools of the trade under such circumstances. And proper stormtroopers, real First Order types, should have avoided overkill tactics like that in all but the direst conditions. Whoever the Jorallans were that wanted to sell out the Senator to the First Order, they didn’t have enough training nor common sense between them to fill a mynock’s bladder.

Poe widened his arc, taking the X-wing in a lazy circle around the mine’s perimeter. The skies looked clear, but he spotted an empty mechanosphere lying about half a klick away from Snap and Jess’s entry point into the mines, in the cover of a rocky outcropping. The mecho could easily carry five to ten passengers; Poe grimaced, and let Snap and Jess know what kind of company they might be expecting. Ten untrained idiots with blasters could do plenty of damage, even against two of the best the Resistance had to offer -- especially when a freshly destabilized mine and a hostage came into play.

“On it, boss,” said Snap. “We have their position, and they’re running hot and in a panic. Light this thing up to herd them our way, and we’ll smash-and-grab this smash-and-grab.”

“With pleasure.” Poe leaned into the curve as he brought his ship back around. No, an X-wing simply couldn’t match something like a Y-wing when it came to firepower. But there were always workarounds.

He reached across his body and over his shoulder to crank the flow regulators to their highest settings. For a moment, his engines crackled white-hot, and the ship roared forward in answer. If anyone was watching, they knew he was here now.

But this trick wasn’t all for show. Poe was flying low, and the heat from his engines sparked the trickle of fuel, siphoned out of Jess's X-wing and poured down the farthest mine shafts. The shaft went up in a ribbon of fire that pulled a whoop of victory out of Poe.

“Keep it down,” groaned Jess. “We’ve still got you in our ears.”

“That’s ‘keep it down, _commander’_ to you, I think, Pava.” A grunt from Jess in response. “You ready for this?”

“I AM READY, MASTER TEMMIN.”

“Just watch out for the Senator, Bones, we need her to come in alive and well. Are we go, boss?”

Poe took a deep breath. He smelled hot metal, old sweat, scorched sand. “We are go,” he said. Someone had come out of the mechanosphere. They were dressed in desert gray-and-beige, but he could make them out: setting up a tripod to support a heavy blaster. His hand was steady on the controls, and the mecho erupted into shrapnel. “Light the bastards up,” he said under his breath, but there was nothing from the comm but blaster fire and shouts of pain.


	6. Chapter 6

Even hearing their voices over his headset wasn’t enough to make the pounding heartbeat in Poe’s temples come down from its crescendo. He could only breathe again, _really_ breathe again, when he saw them put their heads up from the mine shaft and look around. He counted them: one orange flightsuit, then two. A thoroughly carbon-scored droid. Two shocked-looking guards in Senate blue.

And one Senator, dark robes flapping, a hand raised to shield her face from the powdery sand blown about by the blasting hot Jorallan winds.

BB-8’s trill of elation sounded behind Poe’s head as he brought the X-wing in for a landing, beside the shuttle just beyond the perimeter of the mine. He was already checking them over as he leapt out of the cockpit and ran toward them across the sandy stone of the field. Jess was limping, Snap had a burn across one cheekbone -- probably from a too-close-for-comfort blaster bolt. He clapped them each on the shoulder as they went by. “I should have been in there with you,” he said, though he hadn’t meant to.

“No,” said Jess. “You shouldn’t have, Commander.” She tipped her chin up, peering at him under the visor of her flight helmet. Poe realized she was giving him the same kind of once-over that he’d given her. Whatever she saw, she nodded, and jerked her shoulder toward the shuttle. “I’ll show the Senator aboard. We won’t make our 0930, but who cares? Let’s blow this planet and never come back to pay the launch fines.”

Poe nodded. “We’ll hit Barcaria on the way back and juice up your bird. I’d rather be flying with two escorts than just one.”

“Same here.” Jess began to trot off, then paused when Senator Madin didn’t follow. “Senator?”

“A moment, please.” Madin took a few steps toward Poe. She was older than he’d realized, in the inconstant light he’d met her in before. “I’d already turned down your offer. You didn’t have to come for me. I imagine that carried some cost to you again, and for that, I am sorry.”

“Turns out someone else picked up the tab this time.” Just beyond Madin’s shoulder, Snap averted his gaze to fuss over Mister Bones’ smoldering hull; Jess met Poe’s eyes and lifted her chin in answer. “Senator, we can help you. We can protect you. But you have to let us.”

“Yes.” Madin extended her gloved hand, and Poe clasped it. He was suddenly obscurely glad she couldn’t feel how clammy his fingers were. “I hear Chandrila is pleasant this time of year.”

“It’s certainly cooler. You interested in a one-way ticket?”

“I may spend the season there.” The Senator released Poe’s hand, and her smile was hard. “We shall see what the future brings.”

“Good enough for me,” said Poe, and it was.

#

It wasn’t until after they’d fueled up Jess’s ship at Barcaria that Snap opened up a private channel from the shuttle. They were just lining up for the jump back to hyperspace when Poe’s comm chirped. “You there, boss?”

“Looks that way.” The starfield stretched out into infinity around Poe’s X-wing, and the blue strangeness of hyperspace swallowed him up. “What’s up?”

“Senator’s settled in to the passenger berths in the back. Her guards, too. We should be back to base by 1500.”

Poe, who had a fully functional and rarely quiet astromech droid, was well aware of their ETA. “Spit it out, Snap.”

Silence from the comm. “Did you know my mom knew yours? They flew together at the Battle of Endor.”

That feeling again, of strong warm hands over his own on the controls of the X-wing. Poe wished his mother could have seen him reach the rank of commander (he would have outranked her, a fact which he would have liked to rib her over). Though maybe it was all right that she hadn’t lived long enough to see all her work for the Rebellion come so far undone. Cold fingers reached for the treasured memory; Poe slapped them back and clutched it close. “I didn’t know that,” he said, when he was able. He knew Snap’s mother had served with Snap as part of that rogue strike unit, but he hadn’t realized she was a pilot too. Or he’d forgotten. “Were they friends?”

“Just acquaintances. She mentioned it once, when I told her who I was serving under here.” Snap chuckled. “She flew Y-wings. You know how A-wing speed lovers and Y-wing slug-pluggers get along.”

Or how they didn’t, more precisely. “Ha. Generation Ditto, here we are.”

“Now, now, boss, haven’t you heard the party line? ‘The First Order isn’t the Empire, and to treat them as such is to blah blah the hard work of the civilization that we blah blah blah.’” Snap made a sharp sound, half pained, half embarrassed. “Sorry. That comes a little too close to speaking ill of the dead.”

“Meet the New Republic, same as the Old Republic.” Poe grimaced. “We have to learn at some point, don’t we? Stop flying into the same walls at lightspeed?”

“I hope so.” They flew in silence for a few more moments, the comm channel still open between them. Finally Snap piped up again. “She used to have nightmares. My mother, I mean. Bad stuff. Sometimes she’d even lock up, right in the middle of the mix. Not often. Especially not if I was there. But she’d be -- she’d be right back in the Death Star, you know? Seeing all the wingmen she’d lost. Smelling the smoke.” Snap coughed. “It got better. It never … stopped.”

“Never does,” said Poe. Behind him, BB-8 crooned reassurance.

“No. But she could come back from that. So will you.” A creak, from a seat pushed back. Snap was a big man, even in a shuttle’s more generous cockpit a long haul could get tiresome. “She’s still around. Retired, of course. Back on Akiva, where I grew up. My aunts still live there too. I could hook the two of you up, if you wanted.”

“What, like on a date? I don’t go for septuagenarians.” He cut off Snap’s scandalized snort before the other pilot could fire off a comeback. “Yeah. Put me in touch, Snap, I’d like that.”

“You got it, boss.” There was the usual smile back in Snap’s voice.

Poe let the comm channel close, and let himself slouch back in his seat. BB-8 burbled a question, and he rolled his head back for a glimpse of the droid’s little orange dome behind him. “Yeah, I’m working on it, buddy.” Another beep. “Yeah. Some things are worth the cost.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me to the end of this, and happy end-of-2015! I hope to be back sometime in the new year with more X-wing adventures. :)


End file.
